Ancient Earth – Chittrovanu Mazumdar

Ancient Earth – Chittrovanu Mazumdar

The harsh, topography of rural Jharkhand has long been an important feature in the work of Chittrovanu Mazumdar, who has repeatedly explored its strange, enigmatic, almost lunar, vistas. It forms the entire focus of this latest show in which three series of photographs – temple works, landscapes and earthscapes - are presented along with two single channel video pieces and a floor projection.

The intensity of Chittrovanu's vision is immediately apparent in these works, emanating not only from the extreme terrain that is his subject, but also from his manipulation of the images to produce a hightened level of expressive communication, dissolving the distant horizons and the billowing cloud formations of the flat Jharkhand landscape into a state of reductive abstraction. At the same time the rugged resistance of this unforgiving landscape imparts a symbolic analogy with the rural politics of an area which has long harboured Naxalite activity.

The series of landscapes reveal a scorched firmament of cracked mud, rocks and gullies, where solitary trees stand in rare defiance of the hostile elements. In Chittrovanu's hands, their very uniformity is transformed into a study of texture and tone, the muted colours and burnished surfaces imbue the works with a sacred, mural-like quality. The same landscape is in the lens of the video piece, overlayed with the artist's own hypnotic soundtrack, an audio collage including readings from Rilke's Elegies.

In a series of Earthscapes, Chittrovanu has turned his eye downwards, further marking his fascination with the very nature of the land in rural Jharkhand. These works find abstract, almost painterly beauty in close-up shots of the tough and tangled weeds and baked clay underfoot.

- Lucian Harris

The temple… His father built this. He was an artist. This was a place of his childhood. His memories of it are varied and vibrant, themselves reconstituted like vertebrae, like the doppelganger of another place and time. No water. No electricity. This was a place to be quiet. It was a place to feel awe at immensity and fear at the unknown. Jharkhand was a stepmother to the comforts of Calcutta, temperamental and implacable.

If the temple structure is itself a skeleton, the photographs are a skin. The skin operates as a matrix of memories. And a refusal to follow a linear unfolding of time or a steady evolution of place. Time moves quickly and stops, while day and night have strange negotiations over dominion. The artist does not capture these moments with a violent directness. Rather, he looks to the oblique recipients of light and dark, the puddles of water on the floor of the temple. And the mud specked reflections of time. The large expanse of sky above head is a constant hand of familiarity. Seemingly unchanged, it is a catalyst of nostalgia for a time that came before.

The womb is absent. The garba griha is an open space, susceptible to the whims of weather and timely decay. It is not a closed up airless chamber, where creatures fester in the dark. And yet there is the pleasure of penetration. Of entering a space that is, in some conceivable way, different from the previously inhabited domain. The boundaries between the inside and out are not the intractable lines of an institutional framework, which would be guarded as vigilantly from the outside as within. They are instead lines of flight, composed of the violent detours and retraced footprints of memory.

There is no secure localization or ritualized reception. The foundation stones are pedestals unto themselves, they are high altars facing the skies. The temple itself is an unlikely place for sanctified worship. It has no walls. It has no roof. It has no idol. It does not have a specific entrance or exit. It reveals itself through what it is not. Four stairs point in four different directions, offering the choice of path and trajectory. Four identical archways open up on four sides. Above the entrance, on all sides, sits a clay pot, one of the only decorative signs on the temple. This telling addition is repeated on a second level of arches which complete the skeletal structure. On the tip sits another vessel, the symbolic container of work and reward. Diametrically below this vessel is an open flower, a halo and a crown of thorns, a blessing and a point of reverence. When the sun is up ahead, the flower creates shadows on the brows and bodies of visitors, a sanction to their entering the sacred space.

His father built this. He was an artist. This was a place of his childhood. His memories of it are varied and vibrant, themselves reconstituted like vertebrae, like the doppelganger of another place and time. No water. No electricity. This was a place to be quiet. It was a place to feel awe at immensity and fear at the unknown. Jharkhand was a stepmother to the comforts of Calcutta, temperamental and implacable.

If the temple structure is itself a skeleton, the photographs are a skin. The skin operates as a matrix of memories. And a refusal to follow a linear unfolding of time or a steady evolution of place. Time moves quickly and stops, while day and night have strange negotiations over dominion. The artist does not capture these moments with a violent directness. Rather, he looks to the oblique recipients of light and dark, the puddles of water on the floor of the temple. And the mud specked reflections of time. The large expanse of sky above head is a constant hand of familiarity. Seemingly unchanged, it is a catalyst of nostalgia for a time that came before.